I Built a $10K/Month App from My Mom’s Basement

This video is an educational case study of one founder’s experience. It is not financial advice and does not guarantee any income or results. Every business is different and your results may vary.

Chapters

Stack

Transcript

Chapter list

No chapters provided for this video yet.

Stack

Vercel (link)
ChatGPT (link)

I taught myself how to code and I built two apps that now make me 10 000 a month all from my mom's basement

How did this guy teach himself to code and then build two apps to 10 000 a month

Well the answer lies in how he spends his time

I spend one hour a day marketing and I generated over 300 million views and made a thousand videos

The secret is

Jackfrix started his journey as a kid working at McDonald's

saving up money so he could start pursuing his dreams of building online

Once he'd saved up enough he quit his job

dropped out of college and started building apps from his mom's basement

And within one year he started making money

I think the biggest reason most people overcomplicate

building profitable apps is because they're not trying to solve a painful enough problem

I spent almost two hours talking to Jack about his apps and how anyone can start

building profitable products like him from scratch and on a budget

budget Luckily he shared everything

How he finds profitable ideas how he scrappily builds products and monetizes quickly

and his one hour a day marketing strategy that's gotten him

millions of views and thousands of downloads

Now let's get into it

I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story

Welcome Jackfrix to the Starter Story YouTube channel

Tell me a little bit about yourself and what you build

My name is Jackfrix

I built two startups that make me 10 000 a month all from my mom's basement

The first thing I built was Curiosity Quench

a consumer app that helps people scroll less on their phones

It took me four months to build it because I was learning how to code at the time

That now makes me 3 000 a month in monthly recurring revenue

and it's made me over 60 000 in the last year

The second thing I built was a social media scheduling tool called Postbridge

After four and a half months it hit 7 000 in monthly recurring revenue

and it's made me about 40 000 in the first five months

All right Jack can you give me a further breakdown of the businesses that you built

Yeah so Curiosity Quench I built to help people scroll less on their phones

by giving them hobbies to do

It charges about 30 a year for the subscription with a seven day free trial

It has over 100 000 downloads and then that led me to build another business

which is called Postbridge that helps people basically post social media posts

quicker easier faster from one place

It is a web application

The starting plan for Postbridge is 9 a month

but now there is a few other pricing tiers

Cool okay

Tell me a little bit about what got you into building online

Give us a timeline of when things started for you as an entrepreneur

Yeah so three years ago I dropped out of college

college because I realized I did not want to work a job

I really just wanted my own freedom

my own autonomy to do whatever I want on my own time

It sounds dramatic but I would often tell my friends and myself that

I would rather be homeless than work a job

Basically I quit my job at McDonald's

I dropped out of school in the same few months

months to pursue a bunch of different businesses in three years

making a book selling t shirts having a crypto YouTube channel

many other things

I eventually landed on learning how to code

I kind of just went into it head on

The first thing I went to build was actually Curiosity Quench

Everything broke almost every single time I built it

I just kept putting errors after errors into ChachiPT

and eventually had a working product

but it didn't go like skyrocket growth right away

I still had to keep working on it and find new angles on how to market it

how to get into people's hands

hands So that was still an ongoing process for many months

even after I built it

Nice man

Let's go on to ideas man

I want to get a little bit into the dirty details here

Can you tell me a little bit about how you find ideas

and specifically how you found the ideas for Curiosity Quench and Postbridge

So I think the best way to find any good idea is to solve your own problems

For Curiosity Quench

my problem was that I was scrolling all day on my phone

or at least a few hours when I woke up

and there wasn't really any apps that to me were very great

So I was trying to tackle it from a different angle

and ultimately what I came up with was action plans on a bunch of different hobbies

and that's how it led to me making Curiosity Quench the app it is now

Nice

Okay cool

So then tell me about the second idea Postbridge

and how you came across the problem for that

and then decided what to build for it

So Postbridge came to be because I was spending an hour a day

marketing Curiosity Quench and of that hour

30 minutes was spent posting the same content to every single platform

So I went and looked around and there was options to do it for me

but they cost like 10 times more than I want to pay

So I thought I could make something better and then I just went and did it at a fair price

Okay let's talk idea validation

What does that look like that process

So to me validating ideas was first asking myself

is it a problem that I would pay for to solve

If I would pay for it I consider it a lot more valuable and a painful problem

And if I wouldn't pay for it I usually don't build it

And then for Curiosity Quench as an example

I posted a video 60 seconds on TikTok

I just point and shoot recorded it talking to the camera

camera and 15 people commented saying I need this

This is it

This is good

So I kept making videos

The same thing happened and eventually I realized

hey I should probably make this thing that hundreds of people say they want

All right let's talk about what everyone loves

Let's talk about how you build these products

What's your step by step process to go from zero to one with a new idea

So my process is actually pure chaos

I basically jump into my code editor

I bring up chat GPT or something similar

and I just start asking how I should go about building the thing

And in terms of landing page I have just used like a boilerplate

and I have made very small improvements

I'd go back and edit one section at a time usually

and just make it a little bit better week over week

All right so we talked about how to go from zero to one

but before we get into the growth

I do want to talk about one very important thing

that you cannot forget to do before you launch analytics

And yes this is today's sponsor

but I'm actually kind of nerding out right now

because this is one of my favorite tools

and I actually use it every day

And I'm going to show you right now how I use it

So this is PostHog

And by the way how freaking cool is their website

with this crazy dinosaur thing

But you can install it on your site with just one line of code

code and they have a really generous free plan

Once it's installed you'll get product analytics

session replay experiments surveys and more

But my personal favorite feature is A B testing

And I'm going to show you a starter story A B test

in PostHog right now that increased our conversion rate

by over 300

Check this out right here

This is crazy and why I really recommend using PostHog

But what I think is also cool is that in PostHog

you can track the A B test going through the funnel

and see how this A B test affects the entire conversion flow

You can also even drill down further

and look at conversion rates by source

so I can see how people convert from Twitter YouTube

ChatGBT and a bunch of other places

These A B tests are so important for our business

and there's just really not another tool

that can actually do this

So if you want to install PostHog

which I think you should do and it's free

just click the first link in the description

and tell them you came from starter story

All right now back to the video

All right let's talk about your specialty

Let's talk about marketing

How do you actually get users to these businesses

and have them pay money

So my core strategy and it still is this

is to do everything through organic

To get CuriosityQuench to 100 000 users

was just finding a template that I can repeat

over and over and over again

A very funny simple two by two images caption template

It's six seconds long and having the pinned comment

be go download and try our app

And then I would make a mistake even

to drive engagement in the comments

like astrology and astronomy

If you get those mixed up

people are really gonna get angry

Originally I created my templates

by just making a CapCut project

and copying and pasting it over

Eventually this became a bit too slow

So I actually built in like a template creator

into my SaaS which is PostBridge

I posted the two by two template over now 300 times

on two different accounts

And they've driven 60 to 70 000 signups

just through these simple templates

that have brought in like hundreds of millions of views

Okay we're gonna do a little deep dive

into your marketing

Can you walk through that step by step

of just spending one hour a day marketing your app

What does that look like

So I think anyone can get thousands of downloads

downloads to their app or visitors to the website

just with one hour a day of marketing

marketing with no ad spend

That's a very simple strategy

First I would open a count on TikTok and Instagram

for my product or a personal page either one works

And I would just scroll on those pages

for two days 15 minutes a day each

This is to warm it up

So the algorithms don't think you're a bot

you're a real human being

While you're doing this

when you see videos that have went viral

save them do not post content during this time

comment and follow people in your niche

So interact with posts

And then after you've warmed up your account

download CapCut it's super easy

You can learn it in an hour

and you can start posting videos

From proven examples that you've seen

you spin them with your app

either as a call to action at the end of the video

three seconds or less

or don't even put in the video

Make your caption and your first comment

a call to action to go to your thing

The algorithm loves watch time

And the easiest way to get like 100 200 watch time

is to make your video six seconds long

But what matters more than all that

is to make content that people actually watch

It has to provide some type of value

some type of connection some type of laugh

It could be entertainment

It could be education

But if it's directly an ad

people are gonna scroll

It's not gonna work

So once you find a winning format

double down on it

just recreate that video in a different way

and post it over and over again

Milk it till it's dry

That's great advice

Tell me a little bit about batching up this content

Are you just doing it every day

or do you batch it up for the whole week

or do you outsource any of this

Yeah so I spend one hour a day marketing

I post the videos same day

I usually don't schedule them far out

just because I can iterate way faster

because every day I can try something new

If I'm just batching

I'm gonna have the same still content

for the whole month

that I don't even know if it works yet

So every day means you can improve

and iterate way faster

and you can find a winning template way faster

Agreed

Tell me about the multiple accounts

You said you had like four different accounts

What does that look like

Yeah so I run three Instagram accounts

to split up my videos

because I wanna try and spread all of them out

by at least three or four hours

I don't want the algorithm to think I'm spamming it

It's always different videos

because if you do post the same videos

with the same metadata nowadays

the algorithms are good and they will notice it

So I wouldn't suggest doing that

I wanna go talk about the building in public thing

because you seem to be doing a really good job

of just sharing your story on Twitter

You said you posted 300 videos

What would be your advice for people

that want to get their first thousand followers on X

I think the easiest way to grow a personal brand

is to not grow a personal brand at all

It's just to build cool things

do cool things and then like share them

To me building cool things

just means that you're doing something that's tangible

so you can see like you have an output

For me it was building an app

And for many other people

it might be something like writing a book

book or doing something even around their house

like organizing stuff a certain way

But most people aren't sharing the things

things they're doing in their lives

They're sharing like aphorisms and quotes

quotes that no one really cares about

If you just share what you're actually doing in your life

it's probably gonna be 10 times more fun

for other people to see

and they'll connect with you a lot more

And one thing that I see with people

who wanna build in public

they're maybe a little afraid for fear of failure

or fear of putting themselves out there

Is that something that you experienced

Honestly I made new social media accounts

to get away from all the real life people around me

But the only way you can get over that fear

is to just do it and realize that no one really cares

No one cares if you fail or win

They just kind of are watching on the sidelines

most of the time

and they're not really paying attention to you

They're paying attention to themselves

They're not thinking you're stupid you're dumb

They're just thinking how can I succeed

And they're kind of scrolling past your posts

Getting over that fear was really big for me

to be able to just tweet whatever

and people can really feel

if you're being authentic or not

We talked a lot about marketing

how to get actual eyeballs on your content

How do you convert that to paying users

So I think it's very different

when you're trying to monetize something

if it's a mobile app or it's a web app

For my mobile app I made it a paywall

They can skip it but it just offers them a trial

for the premium version

And obviously most of the great things about my app

are behind that paywall

Also in mobile apps

what's really important is onboarding

Basically before you get to showing that paywall

for them to pay

tell them what the problem you're solving is

and how you're going to solve it

Make them get excited about it

because they're going to be way more primed

to actually spend money on your thing

when they know it's going to help them

For web for Postbridge my SaaS

I did experiment a lot with yearly pricing

but what worked even better for me

was a seven day free trial

There's no free version

You just put your credit card in if you want to try it

You can cancel any time

That was really helpful for me

Free trials and 40 discount on yearly

yearly or a big discount are two really simple things

that I did that drove revenue up a lot

Tell me about pricing for Postbridge specifically

I mean there's already a million

social media scheduling platforms

Why did you win

I just built it for myself

All the other ones to me were too expensive

I priced it at what I think is fair

And that fair price was something

that I was willing to pay

And I still at this price point

make a very healthy profit

So I can't really complain

Let's talk about retention and churn

So now that you have paying users

what have you seen works

with actually keeping those users

coming back every month

The biggest thing for me was just making a product

that is so useful they need it in their everyday life

And that comes I think with the actual initial idea

The problem you're solving initially

kind of has to be sticky enough

where they're going to value it to pay monthly

Let's talk about tech stack

What have been the most useful tools

and languages that help you run these products

products on a day to day basis

What does your stack look like

So my tech stack is Next js mostly

And for mobile apps it's React Native with Expo

And I use also a boilerplate

to start all my web projects

called ChipFast from my friend Mark Liu

I use Superbase for the database every time

Apple Notes some like Trello board

just for my own internal use

And it's like a timer that I have right here

to just track that I'm working

I'm actually inspired by Pat

So every day I just start a timer

timer and I lock in I focus on the task

one task that I'm doing

And I do that for either one hour 90 minutes

or two hours at a time

And that's helped me a lot to build fast

because when you're focused you get a lot more done

Tell me a little bit about the costs

or margins to run a business like this

If you could break those down it'd be cool

My cost for running these businesses is Twitter API

That costs 200 a month

The other bills are just hosting the websites

the database

Usually I think it's around 400 a month

month is what I pay

Very good margins like over 95

Tell me about what a day in the life looks like

you building two different businesses

from your mom's basement

So most of my days I wake up pretty early

get eight hours of sleep

I try not to sacrifice the sleep

Usually read a bit and go straight to work

Probably two to four hours focused work

Then I take lunch and then I work two to four hours again

In the last year I have developed a more stable routine

where I will stop working at dinnertime

because then I can sleep better

than I'm excited to work the next day

That's pretty much what I've been doing

for the last year and a half

What are some of the key lessons you've learned

learned in your journey looking back

What advice would you give to a younger Jack

if you could stand on his shoulder

Mainly to just keep going

A lot of the times in my journey

journey I wanted to give up or I was doubtful of myself

But then a few months later

I would figure out that hurdle

because I just kept going

And also to solve real problems

Something I wish I really knew earlier

was that the easiest way to make a successful business

is really just to solve your own problems

And that was the two things that I did

that were successful were both things

that I had the problem of and I needed a solution

So I just went and built them

Now that you made it

you can do whatever you want every day

You get to build your own products

What would be your advice to someone

who wants to own their schedule

be a solopreneur build cool things

I would say the best advice would just be

to keep trying different things

even when something doesn't work

So you can eventually get through the haze of

this isn't gonna work out

This is terrible

And make it into something that eventually

gets you to that 10 000 a month

It's not gonna happen overnight

It may take three four years

That's probably the average amount of time it takes

But just the ability to not give up

to keep going is gonna be the number one thing

Beautiful

All right

Thanks Jack for coming on Starter Story

I think people are gonna love your story

I love what you built

And it's only gonna grow a lot from here

So thanks man

Jack is the perfect example of how a solo builder

can turn a simple idea into thousands of dollars

But that comes with knowing the right information

and finding the right problem to solve

Now imagine there was a place that gave you all this

Painful problems to solve

the blueprints for building

and the marketing strategies that turn simple ideas

into million dollar online businesses

Well at Starter Story

we have a library of over 4 000 case studies

and business idea breakdowns where you can access this

all backed by data from real entrepreneurs

So if you're serious about building

a profitable side project like Jack

head to the link in the description

and we're gonna give you 52 micro SaaS ideas

so you can get started on your journey today

Much love and I'll see you guys in the next one

Peace

Starter Story

About

Support

Privacy

Get Access To All Startup Data Right Now (it's free)

Join our free newsletter to get unlimited access to all startup data. We just need your email:

Email address

If you are a human, ignore this field

Starter Story

Want to discover ideas that actually make money?

Get our 5-minute email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.

Email address

If you are a human, ignore this field

It's free and read by 200,000+ founders

Email Address

Have an account? Login by entering your email or continuing with Google.

Please sign in.

Email Address

Password

Create A Password

If you are a human, ignore this field

Email Address

Password

2 + 2 = ?

Check your email for a link to sign in

Check your email

We've sent you an email with a link to sign in. Click the link in the email to access your account.

If there's a Starter Story account associated with that email you'll get an email with a link to automatically log in. The link will expire in 24 hours.

Your existing password still works, should you want to log in with it later.

Starter Story

Unlock the secrets to 7-figure online businesses

With Starter Story, you can see exactly how online businesses get to millions in revenue.

Dive into our database of 4,418 case studies & join our community of thousands of successful founders.

Starter Story

Get The Report

Starter Story

Build a business that changes your life, in less than 5 weeks.

Discover a proven system to find, validate, and build your $1M business idea—alongside a community that won't let you fail.

Our next sprint starts soon...